Favorite quote: "Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds." --John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow has died
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Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#42There's a great collection of Barlow's writing here in EFF's archives:
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#43Here's a link to his "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from 1996, published 22 years ago tomorrow: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence I always loved these bits: "Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications." And: "Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing…
Mike Godwin, who worked with Barlow at EFF back in the day, talked briefly about the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in a recent essay:
"Barlow, best known prior to his co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, was writing to inspire activism, not to prescribe a new world order, and his goal was to be lyrical and aspirational, not legislative. Barlow wrote and published his “Declaration” in the short days and weeks after Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, a telecommunications bill that aimed, in part, to censor the internet. No serious person – and certainly not the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations that successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act provisions of that bill – believed that cyberspace would be “automagically” independent of the terrestrial world and its governments. Barlow’s “Declaration” is best understood, as Wired described it two decades later, as a “rallying cry.” Similarly, nobody thinks “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” or “This Land Is Your Land” is a constitution. (And of course the original Declaration of Independence isn’t one either.)"
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2018/01/04/mike-godwin/free-spe...
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#44> In 1996, Barlow was invited to speak about his work in cyberspace to a middle school classroom at North Shore Country Day School, which was a highly influential event in the early life of student Aaron Swartz, as Swartz's father Robert recalls Aaron coming home that day as a changed person.[23][24]
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#45JPB on meeting a partner on an evening when he was due to roast Steve Jobs at a NeXT Expo. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/transcript#act3
Well, I wasn't prepared for that.
Almost skipped over it, so anyone else trailing through who catches this, go and read it.
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#46I never got to meet JPB, but I was lucky enough to attend his keynote at PyCon 2014 in Montreal. It's a great talk, should you have a spare 45 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVzb5YXmeo
He is (indirectly) responsible for the existence of a hackerspace in Fresno, CA. Last year a few of us got together to talk about starting a chapter of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. That conversation morphed into, "fuck it, let's just start a hackerspace."
So thanks JPB. Rest well.
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#47Here's a link to his "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from 1996, published 22 years ago tomorrow: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence I always loved these bits: "Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications." And: "Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing…
This declaration sounds like an excuse to surf cp
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#48RIP - he was a great thinker perhaps 30 years ahead of his time.
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#49JPB on meeting a partner on an evening when he was due to roast Steve Jobs at a NeXT Expo. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/transcript#act3
Incredible story. Thanks for sharing the link.
Re: John Perry Barlow has died
#50I am a huge Grateful Dead fan (I don't call myself a dead head because I was 9 when Jerry died, I never saw them play.) But I always loved John Perry Barlow's songs. My old band used to cover The Music Never Stopped and Cassidy, and my all time favorite dead song is Throwing Stones.
I didn't even know he was a big influencer in tech until I saw him appear on the Colbert Report representing the EFF.
My JPB story is short and relatively meaningless, but back when I first signed up for twitter I just followed a bunch of famous people and would every now and then attempt to engage them. The only one that ever replied back to me was John Perry Barlow, and it made my week. I had interfaced with true greatness. Rest in peace, John!